Welcome to Half Baked, the newsletter serving up startup ideas as epic as OpenAI's $122 billion round 💰
In today’s edition:
💡 A platform to make your website better and better
🛠 How to build a Chrome extension in minutes using Claude
🔋 How a 24-year-old built an $8M business without raising a dollar + more
🔍 OpenAI stats, Gmail update, Jack Dorsey + more
🍻 The ultimate travel safety device
Let’s goooo 🚀
💸 Half Baked x Grammarly: This week we've partnered with Grammarly to offer one Half Baked reader a new MacBook Neo to support them on their founder journey. To be considered, just:
Sign up for Grammarly here
Reply to this email with the word “Grammarly“
Good luck!
👤 We’re Hiring!: We’re looking to hire a new Head of Content at Half Baked. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, let us know here.
🔄 Automated Website Optimization Platform
Test while you rest
Source: Half Baked team
The Problem: Every founder knows they should be A/B testing their website. The issue? Almost nobody actually does it. The stats are brutal - the average landing page converts at 2.35%, but the top 10% convert at 11.45% or higher. That gap represents millions in lost revenue, and it exists because A/B testing is still painfully manual. You need a designer to mock up variants, a developer to implement them, a data scientist to interpret the results, and the patience of a monk to wait weeks for statistical significance. But today, AI can analyze visitor behavior patterns, generate high-converting copy, and design page layouts autonomously. The pieces are all there, but nobody has stitched them together yet. Here's what we're thinking.
The Solution:
💡 The Idea: A platform that automatically increases website conversion rates by analyzing visitor behavior, building new page variants, and continuously A/B testing them
🛠️ Product:
Drop in a single script tag and the platform starts recording visitor behavior - heatmaps, scroll depth, rage clicks, exit patterns - then uses AI to identify exactly where and why people are dropping off on every page.
The AI automatically generates new page variants targeting each identified drop-off point - rewriting headlines, restructuring layouts, swapping CTAs, even adjusting pricing page architecture - and deploys them as live A/B tests with proper traffic splitting.
A real-time dashboard shows which variants are winning, auto-promotes winners when statistical significance hits, and immediately starts testing the next improvement, creating a perpetual optimization loop that compounds over time.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Try the demo | Get the demo prompt
💼 Business Model: $49 - $299/month for customers depending on traffic levels. Annual contracts at 20% discount.
⭐ End Goal: Acquired by Webflow, or a CRO platform like AB Tasty looking to add autonomous optimization. 12-20x revenue multiple.
Rate this idea
🤖 Every Founder's Emails Are Starting to Sound the Same
You're writing faster with AI. Great. But if your investor update reads like it came off an assembly line, that's a problem. Grammarly keeps your voice yours.
What it does:
Humanizer makes AI-drafted text sound natural and authentic
Reader Reactions shows how investors or clients will read your message
Paraphraser adapts your tone for any audience - VCs, customers, your team
Best of all? It’s free. No wonder 40M+ people use Grammarly.
🖥️ How to Build a Chrome Extension in Minutes Using Claude
The Context: There are 3 billion Chrome users and you can put a tool directly into their browser - no app store approval, no developer fees, no waitlist. The best part? You don't need to know how to code. Claude can write the entire thing for you. Here's how to go from idea to working extension in under an hour.
Step-by-step:
Open Claude.ai, select Opus 4.6 from the model picker, and describe your extension idea. Use this prompt as your starting point. Once you've generated all the files, zip them up into a single file called [extension-name].zip
Open Chrome and go to chrome://extensions in your address bar. Toggle on Developer Mode in the top right corner, click Load unpacked, and select the folder you just extracted. Your extension will appear in the list instantly.
Pin your extension by clicking the puzzle piece icon in your toolbar.
Ready to go public? Create a Chrome Web Store developer account ($5 one-time fee), upload your zipped folder, add a description and an icon, and you're live to 3 billion users within 1-3 days.
📊 Are You Burning Too Much to Grow Too Little?
Most founders have a gut feel for their burn rate. Very few know how it actually compares to other VC-backed startups at the same stage. That gap is costing them.
Pilot analyzed 1,000 VC-backed startups so you don't have to guess:
Median burn-to-growth ratios have dropped by half as founders got leaner
Median time to profitability is 4.2 years - and 1 in 5 startups is already there
Startups with the best margins tended to hire more, not less
You can benchmark your own performance against the full dataset in 5 questions.
🔋 Founder Fuel
🤑 Money Shot: A 24-year-old built an $8M business without raising a dollar. Here's how.
📈 Trends with Benefits: The team at Sequoia believes that services are the new software, with over $1T in services due to be replaced by AI agents. This is the defining trend of the next few years.
💬 Prompt Drop: This prompt can replace a full research team.
🆓 Founder Resource: This tool is the absolute best way to generate startup ideas. Trust us…
💵 Founder Deal: Get 65% off Higgsfield, the AI motion design tool that generates pro graphics in minutes.
🔍 Founder Finds
🤖 OpenAI, as part of closing their $122 billion raise, revealed some super interesting stats about how the business is doing. It’s a behemoth.
📧 Google announced you can now finally change your email address in Gmail. What a time to be alive.
🧠 Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha just wrote a piece together about org structures moving from “hierarchy to intelligence”. 100% worth a read.
😬 Felt Sense just used a team of AI agents to rebuild every startup in YC’s latest Demo Day batch. Impossible, yet true…
🍳 Linecook, which is basically Strava for home cooking, just launched. There really are ideas everywhere.
🍺 Drunk Business Idea: Brief Safe
Worried about thieves rifling through your luggage on vacation? Don’t trust hotel safes to hold your valuables?
Introducing Brief Safe™, a travel safe disguised as a pair of underwear. Toss it in your suitcase and rest easy knowing your cash, passport, and jewelry are protected by the universal "nope, not touching that" instinct.
Brief Safe™ - Your valuables, covered
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👋 That’s All Folks!
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